[elktown]

This is goes for a lot of things in tech unfortunately. For example, being stuck in a SRE/devops amusement park can be incredibly frustrating and surprisingly resource intense.

Sometimes it feels like we could use some kind of a temperance movement, because if one can just manage to walk the line one can often reap great rewards. But the incentives seem to be pointing in the opposite direction.

[jerf]

I'm beginning to develop a heuristic around the concept of "amount of the library you use". It's intrinsically fuzzy and still something I'm working on, but in general, it's bad to use only a tiny fraction of a library or framework, and really bad to have a code base in which a large number of things are pulled in that you only use small fractions of.

There are some exceptions, e.g., pulling in your languages best-of-breed image library to load some JPGs even though it supports literally a dozen other formats is less disastrous to a code base than pulling in an industrial-strength web framework just to provide two API calls with some basic auth of some sort. But there's something to the concept in general, I think.

[elktown]

That sounds like a good balance indeed.